Only God can restore our ability to understand spiritual truth
In the previous posts we began looking at why prayer is important for learning truth about God, his Scriptures, and all the great questions of life. Here is the fifth surprising reason to pray for understanding.
5. Sin Cripples Our Ability to Understand Truth.
What sin has done to the human mind could be compared to brain damage. Sin affects our ability to think, as a stroke affects the brain.
Ephesians 4:17–19 says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”
Notice the crippling and cascading effects of sin on every level of one’s ability to think, understand, and truly know truth.
We need God to overcome this cognitive impairment, and so we need to pray for his help in overcoming the mind-tangling effects of wrong beliefs and sin-engrained, mental strongholds that oppose the truth.
There is one final reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth, and we will explore that next week.
When a truth is concealed from us, we do not have the ability on our own to expose it.
In the previous posts we began looking at why prayer is important for learning truth about God, his Scriptures, and all the great questions of life. Here is the fourth surprising reason to pray for understanding.
4. Some truths are actually concealed from us.
Some truths are beyond our understanding not only because of our natural limitations but also because someone is concealing them from us. Someone is hiding the truth from us like the Wheel of Fortune game show covers letters and words.
Jesus once said to his disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” But they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, so that they might not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying.” (Luke 9:44–45)
In his wisdom, God reveals many things—but he also conceals many truths. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Satan also conceals truths. Paul writes of the Jews, “In their case the god of this world [that is, Satan] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
On the road to Emmaus
After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the risen Christ met with two of his disciples walking to a nearby town. You would think that these men who had been learning from Jesus for some time would have immediately recognized him. But Luke 24:16 says, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”
It does not say they did not recognize him because his appearance had changed. Rather, the obstacle was “their eyes.” Their eyes were “kept from recognizing him.” Did God do this to them or did Satan?
I think it was God, who had a purpose in the concealment. Later, as they sat at table together and Jesus broke their bread, “…their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31).
So we should pray to understand truth because it is possible that truth is being concealed from us.
There is a fifth reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth, and we will explore that next week.
To understand spiritual truths we need more than diligent study
In the previous posts we began looking at why prayer is important for learning truth about God, his Scriptures, and all the great questions of life. Here is the third surprising reason to pray for understanding.
3. The natural mind cannot understand spiritual truths.
After several years of ministry with his 12 disciples at his side, Jesus posed a question to them: “Who do people say I am?”
The disciples answered that people thought he was John the Baptist restored to life, or Elijah or Jeremiah or another of the prophets of old.
Then Jesus focused the question on the 12: “But who do you say that I am?”
“Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”
From our perspective, knowing the full story of Jesus, that might seem to have been an obvious answer. But Jesus did not think so. “And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.’”
Notice that Jesus did not credit Peter with prescience for figuring this out. He said the Father had “revealed” the truth to him. (Matthew 16:13–17, ESV)
1 Corinthians 2
That word revealed is important. The apostle Paul explains why we need God to reveal spiritual truths to us: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
Unaided by the Holy Spirit, you cannot adequately understand spiritual truths about God, his ways, his salvation, and his righteousness—understand them, that is, in the sense that you believe them and respond accordingly.
Therefore you should ask him for such understanding. “You do not have because you do not ask” (James 4:2).
Next week we look at the fourth reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth.
No one is completely indifferent about what he or she believes.
In the previous post we looked briefly at why prayer is so important in coming to an understanding of truth about God and his Scriptures and all the great questions of life. We saw that God teaches the humble. Here is the second surprising reason to pray for understanding.
2. Understanding truth requires both the mind and the will
Everyone is predisposed against certain truths. There are things we do not want to be true, and so we do not believe they are true.
For example, the atheist is not just intellectually opposed to the idea of God, but volitionally opposed. He does not want God to exist. Romans 1:19 says, “…what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” Nevertheless, they “suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). They do not want God to exist because for one thing he requires obedience to his commandments.
But the role of the will in understanding truth affects not just atheists, but each one of us with particular doctrines. No one begins day one of their Christian life with perfect theological understanding of all things. We all come upon the various theological truths of the Bible with a disposition toward or against them.
For example, few of us wants to believe in the wrath of God. But you cannot read the Bible for long without seeing God’s just wrath against evil, and eventually if you are willing to accept it you will come to believe that God’s wrath is real and we need to be saved from it.
So we pray for understanding because we need God to change our will to make us willing to believe what is true.
Next week we look at the third reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth.
If you do not pray to understand truth, your hands are tied behind your back, your eyes are closed, and you are hard of hearing. And then there are the serious obstacles.
In previous posts we learned that God leads even the newest believer into truth through three divine guides: the inerrant Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, and the church. Today we add one more crucial guide into truth, which I did not identify earlier and which will bring us to four guides into truth. This fourth guide is prayer. These four guides, used in harmony, enable even the newest believer to know the truth with confidence.
What do you do when you do not understand a Bible verse, or a biblical doctrine? Is your first reaction to reach for a book that might explain it to you? Do you google the question? Do you ask someone such as a pastor or Bible scholar about it?
Or is your first reaction to pause and pray that God would give you understanding into that Scripture or doctrine? And if the question is significant enough to you, do you write out your question in your prayer journal?
What you do reveals what you truly believe about the role of prayer in understanding truth. It reveals what you believe in your heart of hearts about whether God will answer your prayers for understanding into theological truths.
Prayer is the fourth guide into truth, along with the Scripture, the Holy Spirit, and the church.
Psalm 25
Psalm 25:4–5 says, “Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.” (ESV)
Here David prays that God would lead him into the truth. What is theology? What is doctrine? It is truth about God and his ways; it is truth about spiritual things. You can and should ask God to be your teacher. No one can teach you about God better than God himself.
Of course he will typically teach you through others, but by being careful to ask him to lead you into theological truths you ensure he is in charge of the entire process. If you pray, he will bring the teachers, videos, books, and teachings to you that answer your prayer.
Six reasons why prayer is an essential guide into truth
1. God teaches the humble.
Psalm 25:9 says, “He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.”
Prayer is an act of humility and dependence. Therefore we can conclude he leads and teaches those who pray for understanding.
Next week we look at the second reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth.
Who needs the church? Anyone who wants the truth about God!
In previous posts we learned that God leads into truth even the newest believer through three divine guides: the inerrant Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, and the church. We now look more closely at the guidance given by the church.
3. The church
The apostle Paul described the church as “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15, LSB).
Jesus commissioned his apostles, taught them the truth, and assured them that the Holy Spirit would further lead them into all truth (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13). Then the apostles taught the church the essential doctrines of salvation and God’s nature.
These core teachings from the apostles became the cardinal doctrines summarized in the church’s early creeds: The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed.
With regard to God, he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the mystery of the Trinity: one God, three persons.
Jesus Christ is God’s eternal Son, uncreated, fully God, who became fully man. He died for our sins, rose from the dead in a resurrection body never to die again, and ascended to the right hand of God as Lord and Christ.
With regard to mankind, all people have sinned and stand under the just wrath of God, but can be saved from eternal condemnation because of the atoning, substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. We are saved not by relying on the merit of our own supposed righteousness but rather through faith in Jesus Christ, relying exclusively on the righteousness he credits to us as a gift.
The church that the apostles of Jesus founded, that is now worldwide, and that is two-thousand years old agrees on these essential truths of salvation as the teaching of the Bible and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
What about when we seek the truth on matters that are not of first order importance, matters on which orthodox churches disagree? I will have more to say about that in future posts.
Next week I will add one more crucial guide into truth, which I did not identify earlier and which will bring us to four guides into truth. This fourth guide is prayer. These four guides, used in harmony, enable even the newest believer to know the truth with confidence.
The Spirit of Truth takes your mind to another level
In the previous post we learned God leads into truth even the newest believer through three divine guides: the inerrant Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, and the church. We now look more closely at the guidance given by the Spirit of Truth.
2. The Holy Spirit
The third person of the Trinity has divine ability to lead us into truth. Jesus told his disciples, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Jesus had complete confidence in the Holy Spirit to do this.
Notice that Jesus called the Holy Spirit “the Spirit of truth.” We lack the ability to know the truth of the gospel apart from the Spirit of truth. First Corinthians 2:11 says, “…no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”
And 1 Corinthians 2:14 says, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”
So the mission of the Holy Spirit is to reveal truth within the human soul, like a lamp within your spirit, not merely a teacher talking externally to you.
We can have confidence in the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit
The apostle John wrote, “His anointing [the Holy Spirit] teaches you about everything—and is true and is no lie” (1 John 2:27).
Even though our inner world of thoughts and feelings is subjective and prone to error, John had supreme confidence in the believer’s ability to find truth with help from the Holy Spirit in tandem with the Old Testament and John’s teaching (and by implication the teaching of the other apostles), which became New Testament Scripture.
John wrote, “We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:6 ESV) He could say that as a divinely commissioned apostle of Jesus himself.
The apostle Paul showed the same confidence in the Holy Spirit
Paul showed similar confidence when he instructed Timothy, “By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit [the true gospel] entrusted to you” (2 Tim. 1:14).
The Holy Spirit lives within every true believer in Jesus Christ (see Romans 8:1–16), and he is the Spirit of truth who leads us in truth through the Scriptures, which he wrote (see 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:20–21).
The Holy Spirit guides us into truth by illumining our minds to understand Scripture and by giving an abiding internal witness to truth. We do not hear a voice talking to us externally or internally (except perhaps in a very extraordinary occurrence), but we do experience his illumination, his witness, and the divine depth and breadth and weight he gives to truth.
Next week we look closely at the third, essential, divine guide into truth—the church—enabling even the newest believer to know the truth with confidence.
Distinguishing truth from error requires that we rely not on our own understanding, but rather on the guides God has provided.
In previous posts in this series, we have seen the importance of pursuing truth from God and being on guard against error, for we live in a world swirling with deceptions about the ultimate questions of life. These lies can lead to our destruction.
That brings us to a crucial question. How do we recognize false teaching? How does God equip even the youngest believer to distinguish truth from error?
Passing the test brought on by deception
Those who love and trust the true God will not ultimately be deceived and lost due to false teaching—guaranteed—but that does not mean their salvation is automatic. We are responsible to follow the guides God has given to keep us from error.
When you are unsure what is true, you can trust him to lead you to truth as you prayerfully find harmony between three guides:
(1) the objective truth found in God’s inerrant Word (the Bible),
(2) the subjective truth given by the abiding, internal witness of the Holy Spirit,
(3) the objective teaching of the broader church on essential doctrines.
We must find agreement between all three.
1. Scripture
The foundation of all true teaching about God is the Bible.
The apostle Paul counseled his assistant Timothy, “Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching” (2 Tim. 3:14–16, italics added).
Paul was an authoritative apostle commissioned directly by Jesus Christ, and we see in this verse that he had complete confidence in Scripture as the inerrant guide to the truth that brings salvation, just as Jesus had absolute confidence in Scripture and his own teaching as inerrant guides.
“Scripture cannot be broken,” said Jesus (John 10:35).
Notice that I said Scripture is an inerrant guide. People go astray when they think they know better than the Bible and Jesus. That is a sure way to end up in error. I long ago determined that I would humble my mind under God’s Word and believe it rather than believe my own understanding or the wisdom of man.
God is perfect, and he has given us perfect truth in Holy Scripture.
Next week we discuss the second guide to truth: the Holy Spirit.
We must not be casual about ultimate truths but must be in a lifelong, diligent pursuit of truth.
In previous posts we have looked in Scripture at the personal responsibility we each have to love and actively seek truth. We have seen that choosing to believe error is a serious sin with grave consequences. Here is one final installment on that theme.
Blame rests on people who do not value ultimate truth enough to seek it. Instead they occupy themselves with the cares, pursuits, pleasures, and entertainment of this world. They do not make it a priority to study the Bible on their own and with the church to know it well.
Their indifference is a choice. Our choices show what we value, and we are morally responsible for what we value. If we are not interested in the truth God has graciously given in Scripture, if we are unwilling to learn from mature teachers, we are responsible for the consequences.
God has given his truth and put the ball in our court; now we are responsible to make every effort—every effort—to learn it. A good person treasures truth. If we treasure other priorities, we are not innocent victims if deceived.
A man who boards an airplane to fly over the ocean and chooses to watch a movie while the attendant explains what to do during an emergency landing, and who ignores the emergency instructions in the seat pocket in front of him, has no one to blame but himself if the plane ditches into the water and he drowns while those who paid attention to instructions lived. Solomon would probably say, he was a fool.
Solomon
Speaking of Solomon, he deserves the final word:
Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you.
“Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded, because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you.”
Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices.
For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster. (Pro. 1:20–33)
We are morally responsible to love God’s truth enough to pursue it diligently.
That brings us to a crucial question. How do we recognize false teaching? How does God equip even the youngest believer to distinguish truth from error?
There is a reason Satan is called the deceiver and the father of lies and why we should avoid deceptions like the plague.
In previous posts we have looked in Scripture at the personal responsibility we each have to love and actively seek truth. We have seen that choosing to believe error and deception is a serious sin with grave consequences. Along that same line, here are warnings from three more important Scriptures.
Teachings of demons
Shockingly, Paul wrote, “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times [which began then and continue now] some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:1–2, ESV here and elsewhere, italics added).
According to this verse, false teachers and prophets have demons working in and around them. The people they deceive “devote themselves” primarily to that spirit and secondarily to the false teacher led by that spirit. These teachers who use lies actually sear their consciences, deadening their soul’s moral decision-making ability to avoid feeling guilt or shame. No one in this verse is an innocent victim.
All wicked deception
Elsewhere Paul described the deceptive powers of the antichrist and why he will someday be able to deceive most people in the world. “The coming of the lawless one [the antichrist] is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved” (2 Thess. 2:9–10, italics added).
They made a moral choice; they deliberately “refused to love the truth,” which made them easy marks for the deceiver. Paul underlines the moral issue for which sinners are responsible: do they love truth or lies? A person who dislikes truth is not an innocent victim.
Deceiving and being deceived
Paul told Timothy, “Evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:13, italics added).
Deception cuts both ways. Those who choose to use lies enter the realm and power of lies and thus themselves are easily deceived. Those who choose the covering of darkness lose the ability to see. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. They are not innocent victims.
